Related Tags

Five reasons why you need an SEO strategy

Search Engine Marketing helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness.

While paid search can get you higher up the search rankings more quickly, in the long-term, organic listings will deliver a potentially higher volume of visitors at a lower cost per click. Organic clicks are essentially free.

Reasons why you need an SEO strategy:

Search can help you achieve your business goalsWant more customers? More leads? More sales? The internet is a huge marketplace and consumers appear to have lost their fear of buying things via the web. Search engines are often the starting place for a product search, and they’re getting more popular. More than half of all internet users search at least once a day. E-commerce is booming.

Brand visibility / findabilityAbout a quarter of all web searches contain a brand term, such as a product or company name, either on its own or combined with other generic keywords. Should you really have to pay to be found following a search on your brand? Also, when consumers add brand terms to generic searches it is a great indicator of purchase intent. Don’t allow your competitors to rank higher than you on your own products!

Paid search is becoming more expensiveThere is greater competition in paid search these days, which means click costs have increased in many sectors to a point where there is limited scope for profit. Your ability to generate ROI depends on how well you convert traffic to customers, and paid search traffic can cost a lot of money.

People prefer the natural resultsUsers tend to choose the natural search results in preference to the paid-search listings. According to a sample figures for selection of natural search were 60.8% for Yahoo! and 72.3% for Google. This figure increases for experienced users. This suggests that companies who concentrate on paid listings only are limiting their visibility.

SEO helps you build a better websiteTherefore it helps you build a better user experience, if only because of the focus on what you should be doing for the maximum impact in the organic search listings. Better usability. Better fulfillment paths. Happy customers mean higher satisfaction rates and more repeat business. And this makes for a happier boss…

Enjoying this article?

Get more just like this, delivered to your inbox.

Keep up to date with the latest analysis, inspiration and learning from the Econsultancy blog with our free Digital Pulse newsletter. You will receive a hand-picked digest of the latest and greatest articles, as well as snippets of new market data, best practice guides and trends research.